It feels pretty crappy to be adding a news item after three years to say this but...

The server hosting Oldschool-Gaming.com suffered a catastrophic failure at some point during the night on 05/05/2017. When I tried to restore things it turned out the backup jobs hadn't been running or reporting errors. The newest version of the database i've got is dated 23/03/2017 so over a month of posts and private messages will be lost if I rebuild from that. Since there was almost no visible activity during that time anyway I'm going to leave the forums offline unless folks say they want to see them resurrected; I can be contacted via the usual addresses or on Facebook.

Einar Saukas has just released Zen, a puzzle game he has described as having "lots of extremely addictive levels" and offering "countless hours of entertainment" which apparently fits into even a 16K Spectrum.

Yes, there's finally a new update and I must quickly apologise to the writers for taking so long getting them online but things have been hectic - Play Expo is this weekend, so as I write the last of the Oldschool Gaming machines are being loaded with new games ready to show off on our stand before they're thrown into storage boxes ready for tomorrow's journey.

So onto the reviews and what delights have we got this time? Paul has been playing Horace Miner and Horace Miner 2 for the Spectrum but not really enjoying the experience, but a conversion of Pooyan for the VIC 20 appealed much more to Frank and I had quite a lot of fun blowing aliens to smithereens with Robo Type on the Atari 8-bit.

According to Speccy Live, Thro' The Wall is a Breakout clone for a ZX81 with 16K and it comes in a couple of flavours to support different graphics expansions such as WRX. The original game was apparently developed by Psion but we're not sure if it was based on the ZX81 or Spectrum version.

Alessandro Grussu's latest is Cousin Horace, a multi-part game with platforming, mazed-based and shooting action as well as a bit of puzzling, all starring everybody's favourite... erm, what is Horace exactly?!